I am seeking to obey Jesus’s last command: “Make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). Jesus’s final command was to teach all nations to keep his commandments.
Actually, the final command was more precise than that. He did not say, “Teach them all my commandments.” He said, “Teach them to observe all my commandments.” You can teach a parrot all of Jesus’s commandments. But you cannot teach a parrot to observe them. Parrots will not repent, and worship Jesus, and lay up treasures in heaven, and love their enemies, and go out like sheep in the midst of wolves to herald the kingdom of God. Teaching people to parrot all that Jesus commanded is easy.
Teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded is impossible. Jesus used that word. When a rich man could not bring himself to let go of his riches and follow him, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. . . . With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:25–27).
Therefore, the person who sets himself to obey Jesus’s final commission—for example, to teach a rich man to observe the command to “renounce all that he has” (Luke 14:33)—attempts the impossible. But Jesus said it was *not impossible. “All things are possible with God.” So the greatest challenge in writing this book has been to discern God’s way of making impossible obedience possible.
Jesus said that this impossible goal happens through teaching. “Make disciples . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” There is, of course, more to it than that—like the atoning death of Jesus (Mark 10:45) and the work of the Holy Spirit (John 14:26) and prayer (Matt. 6:13). But in the end Jesus focused on teaching. I take this to mean that God has chosen to do the impossible through the teaching of all that Jesus commanded. That’s what I pray this [message] will prove to be—a kind of teaching that God will use to bring about impossible obedience to Jesus. And all of that for the glory of God.
Teaching and Obedience That Glorify God
The reason I emphasize the glory of God is because Jesus did. He said, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). The ultimate goal of Jesus’s commandments is not that we observe them by doing good works. The ultimate goal is that God be glorified. The obedience of good works is penultimate. But what is ultimate is that in our obedient lives God be displayed as the most beautiful reality in the world. That is Jesus’s ultimate goal and mine. This helps me answer the question: What kind of teaching of Jesus’s commandments might God be willing to use to bring about such impossible obedience? If the aim of obedience is ultimately the glory of God, then it is probable that the teaching God will use is the kind that keeps his glory at the center.
The ultimate goal of Jesus’s commandments is not that we observe them by doing good works. The ultimate goal is that God be glorified.
Keeping the Commandments Connected to Jesus and His Work
How then do we keep the beauty of God in proper focus in relation to Jesus’s commandments? By treating the meaning and motivation of the commands in connection with the person and work of Jesus. The person and work of Jesus are the primary means by which God has glorified himself in the world. No revelation of God’s glory is greater. Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Therefore, his person is the manifestation of the glory of God. To see him as he really is means seeing the infinitely valuable beauty of God. Jesus also said, as he was praying, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). Therefore, his work is a manifestation of the glory of God. When we see what he achieved and how he did it, we see the majesty and greatness of God.
Therefore, my aim has been to probe the meaning and the motivation of Jesus’s commands in connection with his person and work. What emerges again and again is that what he is commanding is a life that displays the worth of his person and the effect of his work. His intention is that we not disconnect what he commands from who he is and what he has done.
We should not be surprised, then, that Jesus’s final, climactic command is that we teach all nations to observe all that he commanded. This leads to his ultimate purpose. When obedience to his commands happens, what the world sees is the fruit of Jesus’s glorious work and the worth of his glorious person. In other words, they see the glory of God. This is why Jesus came and why his mission remains until he comes.
John Piper is founder and lead teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. He served for thirty-three years as a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of more than fifty books, including Desiring God; Don’t Waste Your Life; and Providence.
The Ten Commandments are part of the OT Law, but NT authors do quote or allude to the commandments quite often as being relevant for new covenant Christians (except for one).
If contentment has been a losing battle for you, if coveting comfort or cash or companions has been your common state, let the good news sink in: contentment is learned.
One catechism defines sin this way: “What is sin? Sin is rejecting or ignoring God in the world he created, not being or doing what he requires in his law.”1 Or as artist Shai Linne says, “What is sin? Sin is the breaking of God’s law plus our condition, which means from birth we all got flaws.”2
Sin is in us and comes out of us. We are born with a sin nature, and even after we become Christians, we still battle with ongoing sin. Sin appears in our affections and our actions, in what we desire and what we do, in what we seek and what we say. It consists in doing what we shouldn’t (sins of commission) and in not doing things we should (sins of omission).
Sin Is Personal (Prov. 51:4)
Sin is also personal. During the Last Supper, Peter assured Jesus that he would die for him (Luke 22:33). Jesus, however, knew that Peter would succumb to temptation and deny him three times. Over the next few hours, Peter did just that. While Jesus was being beaten and wrongly accused, Peter distanced himself from his master, and even said “I do not know him” (Luke 22:57). As soon as the rooster crowed, “the Lord turned and looked at Peter,” causing Peter to recognize his sin against a man he loved and had followed for three years (Luke 22:61). We then read that Peter “went out and wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:75; Luke 22:62).
In other words, sin doesn’t merely break an arbitrary rule. It rejects God, who is personal. It effectively says to him, “I do not love you. I will not follow you. I will not obey you” (see Ps. 78:40; Isa. 43:24; Eph. 4:30). When Jesus looked into Peter’s eyes, he suddenly felt the weight of his betrayal. He had denied the one who had only ever loved him.
Or think of that famous story about King David committing adultery with the wife of one of his soldiers and then arranging the man’s murder. The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to expose David (2 Sam. 12), and David’s subsequent prayer shows how personal sin is. He cries out to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 51:4). Sin is always against God, and it’s always personal.
Sin Is Painful (Prov. 22:5)
It’s also painful. God designed life in this world to be lived in line with his law. This means that the world is “rigged”—rigged to work best by obeying God. Sinning, however, brings painful consequences. In Jesus’s story of the prodigal son, for instance, a younger brother spends all his wealth on prostitutes, parties, and perversion. Maybe he has fun in the beginning, but soon enough the consequences catch up with him, and he finds himself sharing slop with swine (Luke 15:11–32).
I’m not saying that obedience always brings happiness and sin sadness. Yet the Bible teaches again and again that “the way of transgressors is hard” (Prov. 13:15 KJV) and “thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked” (Prov. 22:5). As a pastor, I’ve sat with hundreds of people who compromised with sin and suffered the consequences. As a believer who struggles with my own sin, I’ve compromised countless times to my shame. Sin promises to be sweet, but its aftertaste is always bitter.
Sin promises to be sweet, but its aftertaste is always bitter.
Sin Is Punishable (Rom. 6:23)
Sin is also punishable. My family was driving down a country road recently when one of my children exclaimed, “That’s a lot of tombstones!” As I looked, I saw an entire hillside lined with gravesites.
The picture of all the graves reminded me of God’s warning that sin would bring death. God had said to Adam, “In the day that you eat of [the forbidden tree] you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Or as Paul later explained, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).
But physical death is merely the “first death.” The second death is far worse. The book of Revelation contains a harrowing vision of the day of judgment, harrowing at least for those who do not know Jesus:
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. . . . Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:11–15)
Sinning against God has great consequences. It separates us from relationship with him and incites his righteous, eternal wrath (Isa. 59:2; 2 Thess. 1:7–9)
Sin Is Pardonable (Isa. 55:7)
Gratefully, sin remains pardonable. Though our sin is great, God’s grace is greater (Rom. 5:20). Punishment is his “strange” work (Isa. 28:21). He doesn’t want to punish. He desires none to perish but for all to “turn, and live” (Ezek. 18:32; cf. 1 Tim. 2:4). God cried out through the prophet Isaiah,
Let the wicked forsake his way, . . .
let him return to the Lord,
that He may have compassion on him, . . .
for he will abundantly pardon. (Isa. 55:7)
In pursuit of this pardon, God loved the world and sent his Son to die for our sins and then rise again so that we could be forgiven (John 3:16). The good news offered to us is that God will not only forgive us if we turn to Christ but also empower us to fight sin (Titus 2:12–13). This means that, if we are trusting in Christ, we don’t have to be dominated by sin any longer. We can walk in freedom and joy (Gal. 5:16–17).
Notes:
The New City Catechism: 52 Questions and Answers for Our Hearts and Minds (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), q. 16 (46–47). Cf. Westminster Shorter Catechism q. 14; Westminster Larger Catechism q. 24; and Benjamin Keach’s Catechism q. 18, in The Philadelphia Confession of Faith Being the London Confession of Faith Adopted by the Baptist Association 1742, with Scripture References and Keach’s Catechism (Sterling, VA: Grace Abounding Ministries, 1977).
Shai Linne, “Atonement Q&A,” on The Atonement (Lamp Mode, 2008).
J. Garrett Kell (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) is a pastor at Del Ray Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. He is the author of Pure in Heart: Sexual Sin and the Promises of God. He and his wife, Carrie, have seven children.
In ministry to someone who struggles with sexual darkness, you may get the breakthrough in another screening room, in an area that neither of you had noticed or considered to be related.
In our avoidance of sadness, we often numb ourselves to death with entertainment. Perhaps what we’re running from is not just sadness; perhaps we’re running from ourselves.
When you’re looking out into the realm of social media, it’s easy to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes, but on what social media wants to talk about.
Our digital life can shape our theology in several ways. I think one of the most prominent ways it does is that it tends to make us think of theology through the lens of other things, like news or controversies. The whole Bible is given to us for our instruction, but it’s really easy, when you’re looking out into the realm of social media, to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes but on what social media wants to talk about.
The internet and social media are not simply mirror reflections of what’s important. These are programs that are engineered with algorithms to bring certain topics to the forefront and marginalize other topics.
So one of the things that I do see, especially of people of my age and even in myself, is a tendency to emphasize in our theology things that have a lot of bite online, and then we don’t want to talk about other things that aren’t as viral—things that don’t have the same kind of capacity for whipping up a big response online.
And so when we bring that kind of attitude to Scripture, we can, if we’re not being careful, instrumentalize Scripture. We can make Scripture’s teaching valuable to the degree that it allows me to argue with people, or it makes the other person look wrong, or it makes my life look righteous or beautiful.
And so that’s one way that technology can shape our engagement with theology for the worse. And we just have to be mindful of that and continually prioritize what the Scriptures prioritize, regardless of what the ambient culture might be saying.
Samuel James is an associate acquisitions editor at Crossway. He is the author of Digital Liturgies, a regular newsletter on Christianity, technology, and culture. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Emily, and their three children.
Our work, education, relationships, and even worship are increasingly happening digitally. Our tendency is often to think of these technologies as just neutral “tools." But this is not quite right.
All of life in the digital age is presenting us with a dizzying array of possibilities for where we spend our time, how we understand who we are, and how we perceive the world around us.
Gospel fluency isn’t just about talking. It’s about listening as well. This requires love, patience, and wisdom. We need to learn to slow down and listen closely to the longings of their hearts.
I recently observed a conversation a few Christians were having with a man who has yet to come to faith in Jesus. It was amazing to me, and saddening, to watch the Christians missing the point of this man’s struggle and questions. It seemed those speaking to him were more concerned about convincing him they were right than about listening to his heart. As a result, he walked away without any good news about Jesus, becoming even more convinced that this “religion” wasn’t for him. It’s not for me either—at least, not what I saw in that conversation.
We can do better. We must do better. We’re talking about people’s souls!
And we’re representing Jesus.
Helping people come to know the love of Jesus is the most important thing there is, and Jesus’s love for us compels us to love people better. If we don’t, the good news that people need gets muffled by our religious pride.
Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.” We need to become people of understanding—people who seek to understand others before we expect them to understand us and what we believe. We need to learn how to ask more questions and draw out what is deep inside people’s souls. We need to learn to slow down and listen closely to the longings of their hearts. We need to learn their stories. In short, we need to care more about winning people to Jesus than about winning arguments.
Gospel fluency isn’t just about talking. It’s about listening as well. This requires love, patience, and wisdom.
Drawing Out the Heart
Jesus was so good at this.
Whenever I consider how I can grow in being a person of understanding who listens well, I think of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well.1
It was high noon, when the sun was at its hottest. There was a reason this woman was getting her water at this time. She chose a time when no one else would be at the well. Nobody went there in the heat of the day. But she probably wanted to avoid running into one of the wives of the men with whom she had been sexually involved. She had had five husbands, and the man she was then involved with was not her husband. However, Jesus didn’t start with where she was wrong. He actually started in a humble posture of receiving from her.
He asked her for water, and she poured out her soul.
I’ve found that starting with a posture of humility, standing in a place of need and having a heart that is willing not only to give answers but also to receive insight, creates a welcoming place for people to open their hearts. The more open we are to listen and learn, the more likely people are to be open as well.
If you look at the story closely, you discover that Jesus continued to make very short, provocative statements that invited more conversation. He was drawing out, little by little, the longing of her soul.
He’s a master at drawing out the heart.
You notice this if you read the Gospels. Jesus regularly said just enough to invite further probing or create intrigue. He also loved to ask questions so that the overflow of the heart (belief) would spill out of a person’s mouth (words).
I’m amazed at how often well-intentioned Christians overwhelm people with a barrage of words. We go on and on about what we believe and what they should believe, assuming we know what others think, believe, or need. I often find that we are giving answers to questions people are not even asking or cramming information into hearts that are longing for love, not just facts.
We fail to listen. We fail to draw out the heart. And we miss opportunities to really love people and share the love of God with them. They also miss out on getting to hear what’s going on in their own hearts. I have found that when people, including myself, are invited to say out loud what they believe, they come to realize something is wrong.
Jesus slows down, draws out the heart, and listens.
One out of every two children born in the next thirty years will be born in Africa, but many won’t have access to God’s Word. Every $5 you give will provide a Bible for a child in need. Would you partner with us to support the future of the global Church? Learn More.
Talk Less, Listen More
As we are changed by the gospel, we want to share how the gospel has changed us. It’s a great thing to do so. In fact, one of the keys to growing in gospel fluency is to regularly share what Jesus has done or is doing in our lives with others. Our stories are powerful demonstrations of the gospel’s power to save.
However, if we don’t also listen, we tend to share the good news of Jesus in a way that applies primarily to our lives, the way it was good news to us, but fails to address the situations others are facing. We can become proclaimers of the good news while remaining ignorant of the ways in which others need to hear it. This doesn’t negate how good the news of Jesus is at all. However, if we read the rest of the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman, we find that while her testimony created intrigue, the people in the village had to meet Jesus for themselves. It wasn’t enough for her just to share her story. They had to get to Jesus as well.
So she brought them to him.
Our job is to testify to Jesus’s work in our lives while also listening closely to others so we know how to bring the truths of Jesus to bear on the longings of their hearts. We need to bring them to Jesus so he can meet their unique needs and fulfill their personal longings.
In order to do this, we have to slow down, quiet our souls, ask good questions to draw out the hearts of others, and listen.
Our stories are powerful demonstrations of the gospel’s power to save.
Francis Schaeffer said, “If I have only an hour with someone, I will spend the first fifty-five minutes asking them questions and finding out what is troubling their heart and mind, and then in the last five minutes I will share something of the truth.”2
My regular counsel to Christians these days is to spend more time listening than talking if they want to be able to share the gospel of Jesus in a way that meaningfully speaks to the hearts of others.
We were created by God to find our greatest satisfaction and fulfillment in him. Every human is hungry for God. Everyone has eternity written on their hearts, producing a longing for something—someone—better, more significant, and eternal. This is a longing for God (Eccl. 3:11). The cry of every heart— the native tongue of our souls—is for better, not for worse; for the eternal, not for the temporal; for healing, redemption, and restoration. And only Jesus can bring this about.
We all long for Jesus Christ. Everyone is seeking him, even if they don’t know it.
They are looking for something to fulfill their longings and satisfy their thirst.
However, they are looking in the wrong places. They are going to the wrong wells to try to draw soul water. They need to look to Jesus. But they will not come to see how he can quench their thirst if we don’t take the time to listen.
And as we listen, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can discern the longings of their hearts, the brokenness of their souls, and the emptiness of their spirits. And then, we must be prepared to show how Jesus can meet them at the well with soul-quenching water—himself.
Notes:
This story is from John 4.
Cited in Jerram Barrs, introduction to Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 30th Anniversary Edition (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2001), xviii.
Jeff Vanderstelt is a pastor, speaker, author, and founder and visionary leader of Saturate and the Soma Family of Churches. He serves as a teaching pastor and director of missional communities at Doxa Church in Bellevue, Washington. Additionally, Jeff supports church planting globally through training and as a member of the advisory board of C2C Network. He and his wife, Jayne, have three children. You can connect with Jeff at his website, JeffVanderstelt.com, or on Twitter (@JeffVanderstelt).
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
How do I present the gospel honestly and boldly without needlessly offending? How do I ensure I don’t slip into heresy by adding or subtracting from the gospel?
The Great Commission still applies to every single follower of Christ in every generation. Jesus’s command to make disciples of all nations remains just as compelling.
Every believer and every church is called to bear witness about Christ. But until motivated by the Spirit, our public witness is often weak and fickle.
What was Jesus referring to when He asked Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” We might be prone to think that the “cup” He mentioned symbolized the physical suffering Christ would meet on the cross—but, as Alistair Begg points out in his sermon “Shall I Not Drink the Cup?,” He probably had something even more momentous in mind:
What was Jesus referring to when He asked Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” We might be prone to think that the “cup” He mentioned symbolized the physical suffering Christ would meet on the cross—but, as Alistair Begg points out in his sermon “Shall I Not Drink the Cup?,” He probably had something even more momentous in mind:
In the agony of the garden, you remember, Jesus says, “Father, if you are willing, let this cup pass from me.” Now, the cup to which he refers is a symbol of God’s judgment. It is the cup of his wrath. You would need to just take your concordance and work on this on your own to build up a picture of this from the Old Testament. Let me cross-reference just two places—one, straightforwardly, in Psalm 75. And in the midst of that psalm, in verse 8, the psalmist says,
For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup
with foaming wine, well mixed
and he pours out from it,
and all the wicked of the earth
shall drain it down to [its] dregs
—that God, in exercising his judgment on wickedness, will pour out the cup of his wrath.
You have it elsewhere, but let me just give one other, and that would be in Isaiah and in chapter 51. And the prophet says,
So the cup that is being referenced here by Jesus is that cup. It is the cup of God’s wrath. So when we think about Jesus in the garden saying, “Father, if it is possible for this cup to pass from me,” we’ve immediately gone wrong if we think what he is saying is simply “I don’t want to have to face the ignominy of this” or “I don’t like the idea of my friends and myself being separated from me” and so on—“I am afraid of the physicality of it,” if you like. All of that may be true, but that is not the issue. Because the cup that he doesn’t want to drink is the cup poured out by the Father on all the wickedness and ungodliness of humanity. Jesus didn’t want to drink that cup. If you said, “What is Jesus’ will?” Jesus’ will was “I don’t want to drink that cup.” How do we know that? Because he said it. He said it.
Biblically speaking, masculinity is what long-term sanctification produces in Christian men and femininity what long-term sanctification produces in women.
How Do the Nonphysical Differences Between Men and Women Relate to the Physical Differences?
In C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novel Perelandra, Dr. Ransom is on the planet Venus and at one point witnesses an angelic celebration. He realizes that some of the angels seem to be masculine and some feminine. We’re told that Ransom “found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore.”1 There was something unmissable and yet also indefinable about this masculinity and femininity. Some of us may relate: we know masculinity and femininity exist, we recognize them when we see them, but we struggle to put our finger on exactly what each consists of.
In his book The Meaning of Marriage, Tim Keller makes a similar point:
It is my experience that it is nearly impossible to come up with a single, detailed, and very specific set of “manly” or “womanly” characteristics that fits every temperament and culture. Rather than defining “masculinity” and “femininity” (a traditional approach) or denying and suppressing them (a secular approach), I propose that within each Christian community you watch for and appreciate the inevitable differences that will appear between male and female in your particular generation, culture, people, and place.2
This means that true, biblical masculinity and true, biblical femininity are, respectively, simply what naturally emerges when men and women grow in Christ. Biblically speaking, masculinity is what long-term sanctification produces in Christian men and femininity what long-term sanctification produces in women.
This must certainly be true; whatever else manhood and womanhood are, they can’t be less than or different from godliness in a man or a woman. We can often recognize real masculinity and femininity when we see it, even if we don’t necessarily feel able to pin such things down.
Writer and teacher Jen Wilkin suggests that our physical differences go some way to explaining our nonphysical differences. For example, she says, the greater physical size and strength of most men compared to most women significantly shapes how each sex sees the world.3 Women, she suggests, will more likely be conscious of physical vulnerability in a way that won’t generally be the case with as many men, and as a result women are more likely to be attuned to and sympathetic toward vulnerability in others.
I was recently glancing at a discussion on Facebook about transgenderism and noticed that someone—not a Christian, by all accounts—made a similar point. The issue was whether transgender women (biological males identifying as female) could fully enter into the experience of womanhood without having had to encounter the world as a biological female, and this commenter (a woman) said, “In my experience men finally ‘get it’ when they become elderly. You have no clue what it’s like to live in a world where half the population can beat you to a pulp.” Entering into older age and beginning to experience a measure of physical vulnerability can help men understand something of what many women have experienced in the course of their whole lives.
This principle—that many of the observable differences between men and women have their origins in our physical differences—makes a lot of sense. Our body, soul, and spirit are deeply connected, as we’ve seen. It would certainly make sense that our bodily encounter with the world would shape how we each instinctively think, perceive, and behave. It would also make sense that the physical commonalities we share as a biological sex lead to general and observable differences between men and women that are nevertheless not absolute and which will vary from culture to culture.
Nonphyscial Differences
Some of these differences may be reflected in biblical passages addressed specifically to men or women. We need to be careful not to read more into such texts than may be there, especially by generalizing from something that may be particular. But it strikes me that in a number of places we may be getting some indirect glimpses into what some of our nonphysical differences look like.
In his instructions to Timothy about church life in Ephesus, Paul directs the following instructions to men:
I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling. (1 Tim. 2:8)
Paul is directing this call to pray specifically to men. This is not to suggest that Paul doesn’t want the women in the church to similarly lift up holy hands in prayer. The rest of the Bible makes abundantly clear that prayer is not a privilege reserved only for men. All Christians are to be people of prayer. But for some reason Paul felt that this needed to be said to the men in particular.
It seems that Paul’s words were triggered by particular behavior he’d learned about in the Christian circles he was writing to. Among the men, prayer was either being neglected or it was being practiced alongside ongoing enmity between them. Paul’s response is clear: he wants the men to lift holy hands in prayer. The focus is not so much on the hands being lifted as on them being pure. We’ll see at a later point that the Bible shows us a range of postures that were used in prayer—we’ll need to come back and think about that. But the point here is less about the posture than the attitude.
This must certainly be true; whatever else manhood and womanhood are, they can’t be less than or different from godliness in a man or a woman.
But though there is clearly specific behavior Paul is responding to, we also see that it has wider application. Paul hints at this by saying he wants men to be praying “in every place.” This goes far beyond what the guys are up to in Ephesus; the directive extends to men everywhere (and, by implication, in every time). This is not just for them there; it is for us too.
This being so, it may reflect something more generally true of men than women. Men are generally more likely to need to hear the admonition to pray than women. It is not that women don’t need the same level of encouragement to pray—they do. The issue instead is that perhaps men, overall, are more likely to be quarrelsome—not universally (all men, without exception), absolutely (all men to the same extent, with no variation), or exclusively (only men, as if women couldn’t be quarrelsome), but generally, typically. And if this is the case, then it makes sense of what Paul is calling men to do in response. If there is a tendency for men to be quarrelsome, then calling them to be men of prayer instead is not arbitrary. Rather than wrestle one another in conflict, they are to wrestle God in prayer (like Epaphras, in Colossians 4:12). Better to have “hands raised in prayer to God, not raised in clenched fists towards one another.”4 Inasmuch as men sense this trait within them, it is something that can be channeled in a healthy way and put to spiritual use.
The same may be true of what Paul then says to women in the next verses:
Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. (1 Tim. 2:9–10)
Again, we can assume Paul’s exhortation is prompted by particular behavior among his readers that he had become aware of. He is correcting a real issue in a real place. But (also again) the fact that this comes in a letter in which the aim is to show “how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15), we can assume it is not only about them but has wider significance beyond Ephesus at that time. If I am correct, we might expect to see another correlation between what Paul is steering them away from and what he is steering them to. The issue seems to be ostentatious dress. Not that Paul is discouraging effort in appearance; he’s discouraging effort that is deliberately attention seeking. This tendency isn’t entirely absent among men, and again Paul is not arguing against personal grooming or taking care in one’s appearance; he is arguing against ostentation.
Surely there is significance in that Paul’s instruction is directed toward women and not toward men. Just as not only men can be quarrelsome, so too not only women can be vain about appearance. But just as it is telling that Paul directed men in particular not to be quarrelsome, it is likely telling that here it is women he directs not to be ostentatious. I think we can legitimately infer from this that ostentation might be more of an issue among women in general than among men.
And just as Paul, observing a particular trait among men, directed them to channel that trait in a more spiritually constructive direction, so too he does the same here. If there is a tendency to draw the attention of others anywhere, it’s better to draw it toward God through good works than toward self through ostentatious appearance.
These texts were both prompted by Paul’s observing and redirecting negative traits. But he observes positive traits too. Writing to the Christians in Thessalonica, Paul reminds them of how he had ministered when he had been with them in person:
We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. (1 Thess. 2:7)
Paul often likens gospel ministry to the work of a parent. Here he specifically likens it to the work of a mother nursing small children. There was a warmth and tenderness in his ministry that brings to his mind how a mother cares for such a young child.
We mustn’t read into the maternal imagery more than is clearly there, but it is interesting that Paul should especially associate these traits with women nursing babies. He expects such care to be present among mothers. However typically they may be so, they are clearly not exclusively so, as here we find Paul himself embodying the very same qualities in his apostolic ministry.
This sort of tenderness is not uniformly going to be present in all mothers without exception, nor should men shy away from being characterized by it (or Paul would not be drawing attention to his own example of it). Gentleness, with all that it involves, is part of the fruit of the Holy Spirit that all believers are called to bear (Gal. 5:22–23). If it is true that it is more commonly found in women (or at least in nursing mothers), it is not meant to be found only there. This surely is the point. Inasmuch as there may be traits (positive and negative) that are generally true of men and women, we must not be hard and fast about it. Such traits (again, inasmuch as they exist) are not going to be characteristic of any sex absolutely, universally, or exclusively. They may be typical, but they will also be unevenly present and shared with the other sex as well. If, say, gentleness is more typical of women, it isn’t equally true of all women to the same extent. And some men are gentler than some women. This does not mean that such men are in any way lacking in their masculinity; it simply reflects that we manifest the ninefold fruit of the Holy Spirit in differing proportions, between the sexes and within them. God has not called women to bear half the fruit of the Spirit and men the other half. All of us are to be marked by all that comprises this fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. We celebrate these wherever we see them, and we never stigmatize any who bear some of them in surprising measure. Being more manly will never mean being less spiritual. Sam Andreades puts it this way:
Gender comes in specialties. Specialties are things we all might do sometimes, but the specialist focuses on especially doing them. We may do many things for each other that are the same, but the gender magic happens when we lean into the asymmetries. Just as, physically, both males and females need both androgen and estrogen hormones, and it is the relative amounts that differ in the sexes, so the gender distinctives are things that both men and women may be able to do, and do do, but when done as specialties to one another, they propel relationship.5
So the differences that exist are not absolute, as though the things men can do only men can do, and the things women can do no man could ever do. Yet there are some general ways in which men and women are distinct from each other while at the same time being very much alike. We are not meant to be interchangeable, so that all one can do, the other must also do in exactly the same way. It is not always helpful to compare one with another, as though we are pitted against each other in a zero-sum competition.6
As with many things, G. K. Chesterton hits the nail on the head in this short poem:
If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.7
Notes:
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943; repr., London: HarperCollins, 2005), 253.
Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Marriage with the Wisdom of God (New York: Dutton, 2011), 200.
Jen Wilkin, “General Session 2,” Advance 2017 conference, hosted by Acts29 US Southeast, accessed June 28, 2020, https://vimeo.com/243476316.
Angus MacLeay, Teaching 1 Timothy: From Text to Message (Ross-Shire, UK: Christian Focus, 2012), 99.
Sam Andreades, Engendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship (Wooster, OH: Weaver, 2015), 132; emphasis original.
See the observation by Eric Metaxas in Seven Women and the Secret of Their Greatness (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015), xviii–xix.
G. K. Chesterton, “Comparisons,” Poetry Nook website, accessed December 1, 2020, https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/comparisons-4.
Sam Allberry is the associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville. He is the author of various books, including One with My Lord; What God Has to Say about Our Bodies; and Is God Anti-Gay?, and the cohost of the podcast You’re Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Young Pastors. He is a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.
While we should be careful not to reduce gender to cultural stereotypes, we must realize that uprooting gender from biology effectively kills it. If gender can be anything, it ends up being nothing.
What do we say to our sons and daughters who ask, “Daddy and Mommy, what does it mean to be a man or a woman?” Tell them they are made in the image of God and for union with Christ.
In medicine, certain vital signs—breath in the lungs, a pulse felt on the wrist, movement in the eyes—show that a person is alive. The same is true in the church, spiritually speaking: If a local body is truly alive, a few indicators will make it easy to tell. Where these vital signs are present in a congregation, they prove that Jesus Christ is in fact the head of that body.
In medicine, certain vital signs—breath in the lungs, a pulse felt on the wrist, movement in the eyes—show that a person is alive. The same is true in the church, spiritually speaking: If a local body is truly alive, a few indicators will make it easy to tell. Where these vital signs are present in a congregation, they prove that Jesus Christ is in fact the head of that body.
Peter, writing to the churches scattered throughout the Roman Empire, lists four vital signs against which the believers are to measure themselves (1 Peter 4:8–11). Lively churches—in the first century and throughout all ages—are those that possess love, hospitality, service, and praise.
Love Above All
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8)
The apostle is concerned in this verse to stress love’s priority and sincerity. Using language that assumes Christian love is already present in the churches, Peter instructs believers to “keep loving one another.” Of course, his command isn’t anything new. It’s built on the very words of the Lord Jesus to His disciples: “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).
Peter doesn’t want us to view this love as some form of drudgery. He wants love to be undeniablypresent in the churches, which ought to be defined by people loving each other “earnestly.” The Greek word (ektenē) carries the sense of strenuous activity, like how an Olympic runner springs from the blocks at the outset of a race. In other words, the love described here isn’t some kind of mushy expression grounded in emotion. It’s eager love, sincere love, quality love.
We can’t evade this challenge, especially in light of Jesus’ teaching: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). As we think about our own church bodies, we ask, “Would curious onlookers know that we love Jesus based on how we love one another?” That’s the implication of Peter’s instruction.
A great reason for this love comes in the second half of the verse: We love because “love covers a multitude of sins.” This doesn’t mean that love sweeps sin under the carpet, nor that love avoids confrontation. It instead means that love is ready to forgive and forgive again. Love finds a way to return a silent answer in the face of fury unleashed against us. “Love,” Paul writes in the great chapter on the subject, “is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast” (1 Cor. 13:4).
Sincere Hospitality
Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. (1 Peter 4:9)
The second vital sign for the body of Christ is hospitality, which is itself an expression of love. Hospitality is love in action. We know we possess genuine Christian love when we reach out to others, sharing what we’ve received.
Certainly, our churches need to be gymnasiums, training people for the rigor of spiritual warfare; they should be schools, instructing members in Christian doctrine and living. But here, Peter reminds us that churches are also hospitals, providing spiritual care in a society overwhelmed with fear, emptiness, and suffering. Love expresses itself in hospitality—in churches whose members open both their hearts and their homes for the hurting. Peter essentially tells the churches, “Be prepared to disrupt your daily routines in order to show hospitality. You’re always on call. You are to stand ready to embrace the traveler.”
A simple expression of hospitality has the power to change lives.
And just as our love is to be earnest, so our hospitality is to be sincere, done “without grumbling.” This goes against our natural tendencies, no doubt. We grumble when we’re inconvenienced. The only way we’ll view hospitality as a Christian privilege is to recall the words of Christ as He reminds His followers that even the most basic forms of hospitality are directed ultimately toward God, not toward man (Matt. 25:31–40).
A simple expression of hospitality has the power to change lives. Almost any Christian can make a home the kind of place that has one extra seat at the table for the lonely student, the recent widow, or the young professional. And who knows but that those who sit at our tables today may one day end up sitting around the table in God’s great kingdom?
Service for Others
As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength God supplies. (1 Peter 4:10–11)
Practical Christian service emerges from two facts, according to verse 10.
First, Peter emphasizes that we all have received spiritual gifts. No one is without gifts in the body of Christ. We may not have tons of gifts or even possess the gifts we think we ought to have. But the principle stands: We are empowered with spiritual gifts, apportioned to us by God Himself.
Peter describes the gifts given to Christians as the result of “God’s varied grace.” God’s gifts, in other words, are multicolored, like what we find in a rainbow or in a flower garden—various hues intermingling with one another to create a cohesive whole. The church is a lot like that, with God putting all kinds of graces side by side. In the church, the whole is greater than the individual parts.
No one is without gifts in the body of Christ.
Second, the apostle reminds us that we serve as those who are gifted for the sake of others and not ourselves. The gifts of God’s Spirit aren’t toys to be played with; they are tools used for the sake of encouraging others and glorifying God.
Continuing in verse 11, Peter divides the gifts into two groups: there are those who speak and those who serve. Of course, speaking is a form of serving. But the point in Peter’s classification is to distinguish between gifts that primarily use wordsand those that primarily use deeds—between relevant instruction and practical kindness.The church needs both to be healthy.
Those who speak, we’re told, are to do so as stewards of God’s very words. That is, preachers and teachers shouldn’t draw attention to themselves. They aren’t primarily storytellers but heralds of divine truth. And for those gifted for service, Peter reminds them of the source of their strength: It isn’t found in themselves but in the power Christ provides.
Praise
… in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 4:11)
It’s fitting that the final vital sign Peter lists is praise, for the church exists for the praise of God’s glorious grace (Eph. 1:6).
There is a logical flow of thought from verse 10 to verse 11: When we serve in God’s strength for the purpose He intends, it produces the praise He deserves. Viewing the church’s activity within the framework of praise affects how we go about our living. If we exist for God’s glory, then our service will be both modest and strenuous, recognizing the weakness of “me” and the strength of “He.”
While it’s true that we may add to the list of vital signs for a church body, we can’t take away from those Peter lists here and expect our fellowships to be lively. Love, hospitality, service, and praise are practical evidences of a church’s union to the living God.
If we want these signs to be present in our congregations, we won’t be able to muster them ourselves. We need “grace and peace … multiplied” to us (1 Peter 1:3). And thankfully, in Christ, we have the privilege of being able to take that prayer of Peter’s and make it our own!
This article was adapted from the sermon “Vital Signs” by Alistair Begg.
Addressing Doubts about God’s Justice and Goodness in the Face of Evil
When considering the horrific events of the Holocaust, you can’t help but ask yourself the question, “How could God allow such evil?” In this video, Collin Hansen offers encouragement for those who struggle to trust God’s justice and goodness in the face of evil and suffering.
TGC Hard Questions is a series of short booklets that seek to answer common but difficult questions people ask about Christianity. The series serves the church by providing tools that answer people’s deep longings for community, their concerns about biblical ethics, and their doubts about confessional faith.
Collin Hansen’s short and accessible guide answers suffering peoples’ questions about God’s character by exploring the stories of Job, Jesus, and the Jewish people during the horrific events of the Holocaust. Ideal for both skeptics and Christians who want to help others in their pain, this booklet reminds us that God speaks through the cries of his people and offers us the gift of his Son—a suffering servant who makes all things new.
“The problem of evil is the biggest challenge to Christian faith in every generation. Collin Hansen’s short, wise, and thoughtful book is a superb resource for thinking deeply about it and responding with compassion and clarity.”
—Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor, King’s Church London
Collin Hansen (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the vice president for content and editor in chief for the Gospel Coalition and the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and wrote Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. He is an adjunct professor and cochair of the advisory board at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. You can follow him on X at @collinhansen.
In this video, Samuel D. Ferguson carefully walks through the core beliefs of the transgender movement, comparing them with fundamental truths expressed in Scripture.
Kathryn Butler speaks to some of the misconceptions about clinical depression, which can be especially challenging for those of us who are followers of Christ.
In this video, Jeremy Linneman takes time to explain why the mounting problem of loneliness matters and offers suggestions for how we might build spiritual communities for ourselves.
Some claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic, but in this video, Dr. Sharon James argues that a biblical worldview is essential for human freedom, flourishing, and fulfillment.
In this episode, Zach Carter and Jonathan Arnold talk through the importance of understanding corporate prayer throughout history and the value of looking to past written prayers as a treasury of wisdom that teaches us how to live before God. Zach and Jonathan also share some of their favorite prayers from church history, reflecting on how these prayers have impacted their own lives and how they can do so for the church today.
Matt Tully
Jonathan and Zach, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Zach Carter
Great to be here. Thank you.
Jonathan Arnold
Thanks for having us.
Matt Tully
In the introduction to this new book that you two have worked on together, you write that this project was born from frustrations that you both felt related to churches that you’ve been a part of or at least the church tradition that you both are from. I wonder if you could just start off by explaining a little bit more what you mean by that. What were those frustrations that you felt and, how does that relate more broadly to the way that evangelicals often view their churches, view the past, view church history?
Jonathan Arnold
That’s a great question. My own background, which really poured into the beginning of this project, is from a broad Baptist background that was very unaware of its history, at least in the version that I received. And so as I was moving through my own academic career and realizing that I really didn’t have an understanding of why my church tradition believed what it believed or how it came to be, I, first of all, fell in love with the idea of finding that out and of understanding where we came from and why we do things the way we do them—what’s behind that, if there are good reasons. And sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. And one of those things was the lack of corporate prayer altogether, let alone the understanding of corporate prayer from history and trying to tie into a tradition. And so as I continued to study deeper into the history of the Baptists specifically and found not only some of those controversies that came up over the use of written prayers and the writing down of prayers for future generations, even if they weren’t going to use them in their own time, the recognition that we’ve got a long line of believers that we are able to learn from and to join with across the globe and across time to be able to understand how God has worked in their lives and how he’s continuing to work in ours—being able to see these prayers. So it really started as a personal discipline for me of trying to find prayers that would fit in given circumstances, and where God has worked in the past, and how people have put words to that in order to express both their dependence on God, their love for God, but also their understanding of where they are in their own personal and corporate experiences. And to find those and the ability that those have to speak into my own life currently, and then to share that with other people has been just an amazing blessing for me. And so much of this project was how do I get the chance to share that with other people.
Zach Carter
I think one of the things that I loved about what Jonathan said is, well, I didn’t grow up in church, and so I am a new traveler in this world. And so to be plopped into early 2000s, 2010s evangelicalism and see Young Restless and Reformed going on, see different sorts of resurgences taking place in denominations while declines were taking place in others, one of the things which I was helped most in Bible college but then also in seminary was learning what Jonathan just mentioned—the place from which we come and actually that the work of God to preserve his people over time didn’t start in the Billy Graham crusades in the 1940s. The church existed much, much earlier than that. And so the invitation by Jonathan to work on this project was a great one because it was enriching to my own faith to be a part of sourcing these, which is its own journey and story, because how do you even pick stuff like this? That was a challenge and there is a criteria we had to develop for that, but it was extremely edifying to see normal Christians who are heroes and titans of the faith, but with very normal prayers, asking God for help. It was incredibly edifying. It was an amazing project.
Matt Tully
And going beyond even just this topic of prayer, which is the focus of the book that you guys have worked on together, there is that broader question of the value of history for Christians today. And I think many people have acknowledged or recognized that evangelicalism as a movement can tend to be a little bit ahistorical at times. And Baptists—I’m a Baptist, so I can say this—we don’t have the best track record at times in valuing church history, valuing tradition in different forms. I wonder if you guys have thoughts on why that is the case for us sometimes. Not all denominations, not all Christians, not all churches, but so often it is true that we tend to maybe not feel like there’s as much value in looking to the past. We feel even skeptical of some of these traditions or things that are handed down from the past. What’s going on there in our thinking?
Zach Carter
I’m going to borrow George Marston’s language from his book, which is not necessarily talking about evangelicals, but I think it’s applicable here. Evangelicalism, more than being a tradition, is probably more like a co-belligerency against things. And so evangelicals feel like we don’t have a history because it’s better to think of evangelicalism as an alliance around certain things—Christocentrism, biblicism, activism. Those sorts of things. There’s scholarly articles defining what evangelicalism is, and it’s not worth getting into those here.
Matt Tuly:
Bebbington’s quadrilateral.
Zach Carter
Yeah, that’s right. And Thomas Kidd. Tommy Kidd adds a fifth one—a focus on the work of the Spirit. So those things don’t lend themselves to a historical identity. We’re probably getting in the woods here too, but I think it’s probably where young evangelicals are finding the traditions of Rome or the traditions of the Eastern church compelling, because they feel ancient. But those resources are ours too because we’re part of the universal church ourselves. And so hopefully some of that’s been borne out in this work too. Jonathan, you were about to say something.
Jonathan Arnold
You’ve hit on it, but I think there’s an underlying anti-view of evangelicals that is "we are not this" rather than "we are something." I grew up in Louisiana, which is a heavily Catholic area.
Matt Tully
Also a heavenly place.
Jonathan Arnold
Also a heavenly place.
Zach Carter
At least the food.
Jonathan Arnold
Yeah, absolutely. But the idea that I was taught growing up was just "We’re not Catholic." And so much of what we were doing was just because it didn’t look like what the Catholics were doing, rather than we’ve got a reason for this. And I think there’s a large part of evangelicalism and a large part of Baptist tradition which overlap quite a bit that says, "That’s who we are. We’re just not the others," rather than "We have a place to stand on our own." And so often you find, for the Baptist tradition (and we mentioned this, I think, in the introduction), at least in my experience in various churches and various branches of the Baptist tradition, they wouldn’t use corporate prayers, and it was largely because it seemed Catholic. They didn’t want to sound Catholic at all, and so there was no reason to use that, rather than being able to say, like Zach said, these are our resources as well. We come from a united background, even if we come into that Protestant side of things. And then you’ve also got, within the Baptist tradition, a fight over whether we’re Protestants or not and all that kind of stuff. It gets into some complexities there that are well worth learning about, but ultimately land in kind of the same place. It’s been very difficult to find a place for the Baptist and the evangelicals and the breadth of those traditions to be able to say, "This is who we are. This is where we stand." And it makes, then, those much more ancient seeming traditions very palatable to a whole host of people. And so part of our desire in this project is to allow our students to be able to say, "Hey, we actually can land where we do currently and yet draw from this amazing set of resources that God has left his people."
Matt Tully
And Jonathan, how would you summarize what Christians might be leaving on the table if they do remain, to quote from the book, "cut off from the past" when it comes to our history in general but maybe even prayers in particular? What are we leaving on the table when we do that?
Jonathan Arnold
There are several things I think that leads to. One is it leads to a feeling of isolation. You often end up either, as an individual or just as an individual congregation, reinventing the wheel in our theological journey and in our spiritual formation where we don’t really have to. There’s something about being able to sit down with a Samuel Johnson, who just lost his wife, writing a prayer and dealing with the death of somebody in your own life and being able to go, look, God’s people have been here before. And it’s not a it’s not a Band-Aid. It doesn’t solve everything. But to be able to sit with somebody, much like the best of the counselors either in Scripture or even outside of it, that just can sit with you and offer you a shoulder to cry on and to be able to hear you and go, "I can empathize with you." To have God’s people from history being able to do that in their written work, even if they didn’t know that’s what they were going to be doing. I don’t think Samuel Johnson was thinking about future generations when he’s writing in his journal about the death of his wife and how he’s going to deal with this moving forward. And yet in my own family were dealing with the death of a very close friend, a sudden death in a car accident, and to be able to pick up that prayer and to read it and go, "Man, God has been there through the sudden, unexpected death of his children throughout time." And to be able to read that alongside somebody else so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel and I don’t have to think I’m doing it alone. And that’s a real danger. If we cut ourselves off completely from that, then we get to a place where we either think that we’re alone in it or we somehow think that we are the ones who have to come up with all of the details of this and have to create the theology and have to create the rituals or the liturgy in order to do this well. And in reality, that’s not on our shoulders. It’s not something that we’re supposed to bear alone. We get to play a part in that process and leave behind, hopefully, prayers for others, and we get to guide them in their process as well and add our own experience in. And yet we don’t have to try to bear all of that responsibility. For me, at least, it removes a whole host of anxieties, both in the isolation and in the weighty responsibility that feels if I have to do it by myself.
Matt Tully
Zach, maybe I can play devil’s advocate for a minute for maybe the person listening who does come from a tradition that has been a little bit wary of the value of these things. I could think, especially when it comes to a church’s corporate worship but maybe even an individual’s personal devotional time, I could see someone saying, "We have the infallible testimony of the Bible, and that includes lots of prayers. The Psalms is a whole prayer book. Why would I need to incorporate the fallible voices of church history when God has already given us his word, which is a rich resource for us to mine for language, especially for prayer. Isn’t that enough?"
Zach Carter
That’s a great question. And the first thing I would say, if this was a congregation member, for example, or somebody in that way, the first thing I would do is I would say I don’t want to suggest that you need it. I want to be careful there, because we do only need Scripture, and Scripture does give us all those things. However, I would offer that person a question right back to them and suggest, "Why would you read a biography? Or why would you write a journal and read your journal?" What journals, biographies, and even these collection of prayers are is they’re like landmarkers, where you go back and you can see God’s faithfulness over time in a particular area. One prayer that’s dear to me is from John of Damascus. He writes a prayer where he prays for the conversion of his father. Those who know me personally know that I’m one of the first Christians in my entire family since 1830, and so his prayer is a prayer that resonates with me. John of Damascus’s words are not infallible. John of Damascus is a hero of the faith, to be sure, but he’s not the apostle Paul, and he wouldn’t want for us to receive his words like the apostle Paul. And yet that’s a guy who is very faithful and yet is in a moment of vulnerability, praying for the strength to talk to his dad about the gospel. And I would just say to that brother or sister who would come with that objection, it’s helpful to see how other people have been obedient to God’s word in the past, so they can glean insight and wisdom. What this is is not a prescription. It’s really a treasury of wisdom in how to live before God. And so what we’re really trying to help people see is how other people taken Scripture and prayed its truths in their own context. We’re not looking to replace Scripture in this by any means, but how do you pray in such a way that your prayers don’t become, as one professor of mine said a long time ago, just become about your cat’s hangnails. Prayer meetings can get really derailed, like a hospital list of things going on. Which, to be clear, God cares about those things. That’s not to suggest he doesn’t care about our needs. He wants us to bring them to him. But there’s a way to really say, How do I incorporate Scripture in my life? How do I pray without ceasing? How do I engage in real life, applying God’s word to my life into these really difficult challenges? You can think of these almost as like a poetic biography—how people have lived wisely in light of God’s revelation and been faithful to him in a variety of different circumstances.
Matt Tully
Another concern that sometimes people might have—and then after this last objection, I want to hear you guys talk about the actual prayers that you’ve got in this book—but another concern that people might have is just the distinction between a prepared prayer—one that’s been written down and is even being read perhaps—versus an extemporaneous prayer, where maybe there’s the sense that when I pray extemporaneously, I’m being led by the Spirit. I’m in the moment. It’s not a rote exercise. It’s more genuine. That can be the sense that we can have. What do you make of that? Is there any validity to maybe concern about these prayers being rote versus something more on the fly, so to speak?
Zach Carter
I think an analogy would hold, where you probably, if you’re in a relationship with a significant other, if I have a spontaneous date with my wife, that’s spectacular. But you know what’s also really spectacular? If I take time to think out exactly what I want to do, say, how I want the evening or the day to go, then that’s just as special. And I would suggest that God himself gives written prayers to be done in the context of corporate worship. That’s what many of the psalms are for. But then other ones are extemporaneous records of lament or fear, sadness or praise, and so whether it’s written or whether it’s extemporaneous is secondary only to the fact of does it reflect a genuine heart that’s genuinely moved by the Spirit and its affections towards its Maker and Savior. Because you can write a beautiful prayer and it be completely dead, or you could offer an extemporaneous utterance, Paul says, but if it’s not with love—if it’s not directed towards Christ—it’s meaningless as well. So I think that might be a good answer, but I’d love to know if Jonathan has anything to add there.
Jonathan Arnold
Yeah, no, I love that answer. I think there’s something, too, for me personally, as I’m thinking about moving forward and thinking about what’s coming in the week, or especially as a pastor, if I’m thinking about what’s going on in the life of my congregation and working during the week to write a prayer, I think there’s something very unique about that—or very significant, I should say—about the work of the Spirit in my life during the week while I’m prepping that and even while I’m writing and editing a prayer that is designed to be specifically for that situation in the life of my congregation or in the life of a loved one or in the life of a neighbor or whatever that looks like. That does allow for just keeping that idea and those problems and those issues on my mind regularly so that even as I’m constantly thinking about the right words and the right way to say this in a way that is going to be helpful in the middle of a service or in the life of somebody else, that I’m able to pray without ceasing in the midst of that week or whatever the length of time is while the Holy Spirit is keeping that on my mind and allowing me to work through that, and then hopefully it is helping the editing process as that happens. So I think there’s a both/and there. My own tradition is very extemporaneous. I love that. I love being able to hear what people are going through in the moment. But there’s also that time, and we’ve probably all been in situations where the extemporaneous prayer can meander and can either get to the cat’s toenails or can even get to places where, theologically, there are some dangerous things being taught even without knowing it in the midst of a prayer. And so I think there’s a place for caution and a place for preparation that doesn’t preclude the work of the Holy Spirit, as if he somehow can only be spontaneous in the moment.
Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s good. This book includes 100 different prayers from throughout church history. Initially, I think that feels maybe like a lot. There are a lot of different prayers in there from a lot of different people. Obviously, in the grand sweep of church history, it’s such a small fraction. So my first question on that was how did you guys go about actually picking which prayers to include? Were there certain criteria that you had that were always applied, or was it a little bit more free flowing, like just which ones really resonated with you personally?
Jonathan Arnold
I wish I could say it was extremely organized and we had a criteria from the beginning and a matrix that we worked through and it was all worked out. The project, because it started in a more organic way, much of what came about in this project was based around some of the things that I was teaching. In my early church history classes, I wanted to make sure that as I walked into class, rather than starting class with just a prayer about what’s going on in everybody’s life (because you ask for prayer requests, and church history class suddenly becomes about very important things, but not about church history), and so I would always start class with a prayer from somebody that we were studying at that particular period. And so gathering those together was part of what was going on here. So part of this was built around the curriculum that I was teaching through and that I still teach through. And so trying to make sure that I had a wide breadth of prayers that would touch on both the high points—those very significant figures that every church history textbook or every church history class is always going to touch on—but also trying to get some opportunities to show some of the less well-known figures and allowing people to see that God works through the average layperson or the average clergy person during that period of time as well in ways that history has sometimes forgotten if we’re not careful. So looking for those and just gathering those together. By the time we got to the point of putting together a book project, we had a host of prayers. I don’t know how many we have. We still have a collection of them and are continuing to add to them. Those then became the basis from which we chose, and we were looking for ones that sounded like they would actually still apply, that you could actually read them well, that there was something that was time honored about them. We were looking for ones that talked about specific aspects of theology, so you’ll note as you go through these that there are some that are extremely rich in their Trinitarianism. And so you get a feel, especially as the church was going through various issues and doctrinal complications and debates, that the prayers are built to reinforce the orthodoxy that the church had always held to. And so you get very rich theological discussions in several of these prayers that are intended both to be prepared prayers so that the church can be praying these but also to remind them that, yes, we do believe in a triune God; we do believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; we do believe that the Son came in the flesh; and all of those great truths that we want to remind ourselves of. And then we were also looking for, obviously some, breadth across time. We wanted to make sure that we were covering, as best as we could, all of the four eras that we looked at, trying to make sure that we had some representatives from all of those. There are some that, as you’re thinking through what to put together, you want some specific names in there because people are going to look for them. So we have a couple by Charles Spurgeon, who famously prayed very lengthy prayers in his sermons, and you get a feel for that as you look at it in the book just how long they are, which is wonderful, though, in this pastoral mindset of him praying for his people and for his city and for the gospel work that’s going on there. But then we also have prayers all the way back to the ancient liturgies that have been around for millennia. So trying to figure out how to represent that well. We certainly didn’t cover everybody that we’d love to cover. I think we could probably do ten, eleven, or twelve volumes of this before we got to a place where we felt like we had covered a good, wide variety of people. There are plenty of people that we’d like to add, and as we continue to gather more prayers, who knows what that will look like. But at least in my own use of them, they will continue to grow and we’ll add more and more and continue to gather them together and hopefully represent the church well over the course of its entire history.
Matt Tully
As you mentioned, you’ve broken the book into four distinct historical periods, and you have prayers for each of those. You have the early church, the medieval church, the reformation church, and the modern church. So I wonder if we can go through each of those distinct periods, and one of you can pick out one prayer from that period that just stands out to you. Maybe it’s your favorite one. Maybe it’s just one that has some special significance. And then we’re actually going to play an audio recording from the audio book of that prayer so that our listeners can actually hear what you’re talking about. So we’ll actually probably start with that first once you introduce the prayer, and then you guys can share some thoughts on it. Zach, why don’t you get us started with a prayer from the ancient church?
Zach Carter
I think one prayer to highlight would be from Ephrem the Syrian—a prayer for the singing of the church. Ephrem was one of these interesting people from the East. We don’t typically know about him because he was from the Eastern Roman Empire, but he was in the early monastic period, and he really just focused on ministry in his local congregation. He ultimately died from the plague, but it’s evident from his life that he gave himself to his congregation, and he died probably because of his contact, actually, with people who were sick. He wrote tons of songs, but one of the things that I think I love most about this is we don’t typically think about the fact that we should ask for God’s help before we sing to God. And that was his motivating factor in this prayer here.
Matt Tully
Let’s listen to that prayer together.
Prayer for Godly Singing and Speaking
Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306–373)
Whatever is allowed, let us sing, Lord, with instruments and
in the open. Let us not utter anything that is not permitted,
seeing these are but the instruments of frail creatures. Lord,
let my tongue be a pen for your glory, and let the finger of
your grace use it to write words that are edifying. The pen,
Lord, cannot write of its own accord. It needs someone to
write with it. In the same way, please do not let my tongue
begin to speak without you. Let it be an instrument in your
hand. Specifically, do not let it be used to say anything that
is not edifying. Indeed, praises be to your teaching!
Matt Tully
Zach, tell us a little bit more about when Ephrem actually lived. What do we know about the lifespan of his life?
Zach Carter
He was in the early fourth century, so probably born somewhere around 306 AD. The interesting thing about him is that there’s some confusion about this moniker that’s attached to him. It’s probably because everybody was confused about Aramaic in early scholarship. A lot of his stuff that he wrote were hymns to teach orthodoxy, and so his most probably well-known collection of hymns is called The Hymns Against Heretics, which helped popularize these ideas. Here’s what’s interesting. In the early church, heretics often used songs to teach their teachings, so Ephrem recognized that if he was going to match them and match their efforts, he himself would have to write songs. So he put many orthodox teachings into hymns, but wrote tons of commentaries and collections of sermons that still stand today. And so that prayer is significant to me because it emphasizes both the importance of singing in the life of the church but then also our need to prepare our hearts to sing to God.
Matt Tully
Zach, if you had to pick just one line from this prayer that you would say is your favorite, one that always hits you in a powerful way, what would that line be?
Zach Carter
Because he’s writing in that context of heresy and what we ought to sing and what we ought to not sing, if you don’t mind, I’m going to actually read the two lines because they’re almost like a stanza. "Let us not utter anything that is not permitted, seeing these are but the instruments of frail creatures. Lord, let my tongue be a pen for your glory, and let the finger of your grace use it to write words that are edifying."
Matt Tully
It’s amazing. It is so poetic.
Zach Carter
I think it’s just beautiful to think about. It echoes the epistle of James, where our tongues can either be used for blessing or cursing. And he’s acknowledging that, and he’s asking God to help his tongue be an instrument of blessing. And I think it’s just a good reminder for us that we are still tempted to the same things that his time period was, and the same vulnerabilities in the church to false teaching through music is still one that we face today. And then the ability of us to see ourselves as either instruments of incorrect cursing or incorrect speech, to be open to correction from the Lord and be open to letting our tongues be used for his glory, I think is an important reflection for us.
Matt Tully
Jonathan, let’s move to the medieval church. What’s one of your favorite prayers from that section?
Jonathan Arnold
I think the one that keeps coming back to mind for me is one by Bonaventure who is writing in the thirteenth century, and it’s his journaling about a prayer that is actually also included in the collection, a prayer by Anselm about 150 years earlier. And so in this prayer, Bonaventure is praying his own prayer, and he quotes a lengthy quotation from Anselm, which to me is very much what we’re doing in this entire project—of reading the prayers of those that came before us and being able to engage them in a way that makes them our own, brings them into our own experience, but recognizes what has come before us. So in our collection, it’s Prayer 57, which we’ve titled Prayer to Know Christ by Bonaventure.
Matt Tully
Let’s listen to that prayer right now.
Prayer to Know Christ
Bonaventure (1221–1274)
I have not yet expressed or even begun to understand, oh
Lord, just how great the rejoicing will be from your blessed
ones. Of course, they will rejoice as much as they love, and
their love will match their comprehension. But the question
remains: How much of you will they be able to grasp and,
thus, how much can they actually love you? In this life, no
eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has the heart of humanity
even begun to grasp how well they will know you and,
therefore, love you in the next life.
Oh God, I pray that I may know you and love you so that I
may find my joy in you. If I am not able to know and love you
completely in this life, at least allow me to make some progress
every day until the moment of completion arrives. Let the
knowledge of you so develop in me here in this life that there,
in the next life, it may be complete. Let the love of you so grow
here in this life that there, in the next life, it may be full. Here,
let my joy be great in hope; there, let it be full in actuality.
Lord, through your Son, you have commanded us—no,
you have counseled us—to ask, and you have promised to
grant this request so that our joy may be full. Faithful God,
I beg of you, please make my joy full. I ask, Lord, precisely
as you have suggested through your wonderful counselor;
I will receive what you have promised by your truth so that
my joy may indeed be made full.
For now, let my mind meditate on this joy. Let my tongue
speak of it. Let my heart love it exclusively. Let my conversation
focus on it. Let my soul hunger for it. Let my flesh
thirst for it. Let my whole being desire it until I finally enter
the joy of my Lord, who is the triune and one God, blessed
forever and ever. Amen.
Matt Tully
Jonathan, tell us a little bit more about Bonaventure. He’s might be a name that some people have heard before but they might not know much about him. It’s even an interesting name that he has. What do we know about him?
Jonathan Arnold
Probably where most people know the name is from the Catholic university that’s named for him that every once in a while around this time of the year they’ll usually have a team that gets into March Madness. So people will hear St. Bonaventure’s, which is very much named for him. He is a Franciscan friar who did most of his work, at least his academic work, at the University of Paris, which was the university of the day. His dates are from 1221–1274 or thereabouts. He was very influential in his contemporaries’ lives. He’s written a ton of theological works. He interacted with Anselm, as he does in this prayer, he interacted with Augustine and his writing largely in an Augustine tradition, but he also was very focused on the pastoral side of theology. Really seeing how the even more academic theology could be applied in life and how that shows in the average Christian’s ability to engage with God. So he’s writing at the height of the medieval church, and so it has all of the trappings of the medieval church, which is for both good and for bad. There are some obvious problems that come out in that era. But as he’s writing these prayers and as he’s writing his particular works, he writes a very influential commentary on the book of Luke that is still quoted regularly. It has remained a significant work in that field ever since he wrote it. So that’s 800 years on now. But he is ultimately seen as extraordinarily significant, given the title of a doctor in the church by a pope in the sixteenth century, so recognizing that there was some significance to his legacy. But significantly, he also shows up in Protestant literature—people who are coming later on and have turned their back on the Roman Catholic Church. And we know that story, hopefully. But they still see the benefit of what Bonaventure was doing and the fact that Bonaventure really gets at the heart of what Augustine had seen as the gospel and what the remnant had always seen as the gospel in the life of the church. And he’s able to pull that in in the midst of a highly academic and a very brilliant mind and yet one that was very encouraged by seeing the average lay person being able to understand the truths of what was going on in the theological tradition.
Matt Tully
Jonathan, if you had to pick just one line from this prayer, which one would it be?
Jonathan Arnold
It’s hard to pick a line, but I think the ending to this particular prayer is absolutely beautiful. He says, "For now, let my mind meditate on this joy. Let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it exclusively. Let my conversation focus on it. Let my soul hunger for it. Let my flesh thirst for it. Let my whole being desire it until I finally enter the joy of my Lord."
Matt Tully
That’s beautiful. Let’s turn to the Reformation era, probably an era that most of our listeners will be most familiar with. We’ve got some of the major figures like the Luther and the Calvin. But I wonder, Zach, if you could pick a prayer out of this section that might be from a lesser known person, somebody that we’re not quite as familiar with.
Zach Carter
I assume you don’t want Luther or Calvin because they are so well known, so I’m going to turn our attention to a guy named Henry Skougal. This is prayer 89, Prayer of Sanctification. Skougal’s interesting because he isn’t really known to us, but people who are immensely influenced by him are probably known by almost all of your listeners. George Whitfield, Charles Wesley, John Wesley—these were individuals who had Skougal’s work. Skougal had written a defense of the Christian faith and kind of a manual for spiritual piety was universally praised by the figureheads of the First Great Awakening. Even though Skougal lived in the mid seventeenth century, dying around 1678 and the First Great Awakening isn’t until the next century, but his work is very influential for them because Skougal holds up this idea of knowledge of God and knowledge of our failings and our knowledge of that their genuine Christian life is one which is moved by God in piety. Those would be feelings of adoration, feelings of affection, and then a desire to do holy works. That would be probably the quickest way to summarize. So his Prayer of Sanctification is probably the best one because it reveals that theology within his thought, which is that we have to know who God is to know how unholy we are, and then we need God’s help to be made holy like he is.
Matt Tully
Let’s listen to that prayer together.
Prayer for Sanctification
Henry Scougal (1650–1678)
Most gracious God, Father and fountain of mercy and goodness,
who has blessed us with the knowledge of our salvation
and the way that leads to it: Make our hearts excited with the
pursuit of that knowledge and that way because many things
endeavor to distract us.
Let us not presume on our own strength or resist your
divine assistance. While we are working to confirm our salvation diligently,
teach us to depend on you for success. Open our eyes, oh God,
and teach us from your law. Bless us with a diligent and tender
sense of duty to it and a knowledge to
discern things contrary to it. Direct us to keep your statutes
so that we are not ashamed when we examine whether we
have kept your commandments.
Fill our thoughts with a robust and holy disdain for the
trivial entertainment with which the world attempts to allure
us. Fill them to an extent that the strife would not be able to
cloud our judgment or betray us to sin. Turn our eyes away
from desiring worthless things, and make us alive in your law.
Fill our souls with such a deep sense and full persuasion of the
gospel truth that you revealed that it would regulate our lives,
especially our interactions with others. Fill us so that the life we
live in the flesh we would live through faith in the Son of God.
Oh, that the infinite perfections of your blessed nature and
the astonishing expressions of your goodness and love would
conquer and overpower our hearts! That our thoughts would
be constantly rising toward you like flames of devout affection
and would increase in sincere and active love toward all the
world, for your sake! That we would wash away all filthiness
of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in reverence, without
which we can never hope to behold and enjoy you!
Finally, O God, grant that consideration of what you are
compared to what we are in order to keep us both humble and
meek before you, but also stir in us the strongest and most ardent
aspirations toward you. We resign and give ourselves to the
direction of your Holy Spirit. Lead us in your truth, and teach
us, for you are the God of our salvation. Guide us with your
wisdom. And then, receive us in your glory, to the credit and
because of the intercession of your blessed Son, our Savior. Amen.
Matt Tully
Zach, if you had to pick a line out of this, or maybe multiple lines out of this prayer, which ones stand out to you the most?
Zach Carter
Probably just his prayer right in the middle where he asks, "Direct us to keep your statutes so that we are not ashamed when we examine whether we have kept your commandments. Fill our thoughts with a robust and holy disdain for the trivial entertainment with which the world attempts to allure us." And I think that captures the single-minded focus of the First Great Awakening and its emphasis on turning away from the trivialities of the world, and an intense white-hot, pure dedication to the things of the Lord. I think that the germ of that is certainly here in this prayer. It matures, for sure, in the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield.
Matt Tully
I wonder if other people are feeling what I’m feeling right now. As I hear some of these prayers, the full text, even a line like the one you just shared, they can feel so relevant today. These are prayers that are written hundreds of years ago, and yet a prayer that God would fill our thoughts with a holy disdain for trivial entertainments with which the world attempts to allure us—what person living today in our social media age, completely blanketed by entertainment of all kinds and distractions and temptations, we all feel the triviality of the entertainment world around us and how it can distract us from the Lord and from what he’s called us to do and be. And so, again, so many of these prayers can feel so timely today.
Zach Carter
It’s Scougal’s Neil Postman 1.0, right? The idea that the world is distracting is, of course, a biblical one. To go back to what Jonathan said at the very beginning about why this project is so valuable, when Christians have an ahistorical perspective on their faith, and they can’t see the superintending providence of God’s work preserving saints over time, what we miss is that the same temptation—I think Jonathan said specifically that we don’t feel like we have to reinvent the wheel. We face the exact same temptations to be distracted. The medium has changed, but there were distractions since Scougal’s age. And so the battle for the Christian from the beginning has been to not look at the apple, whatever the apple is in your day and age. Let not the typologist get too obsessed with the fact that there are apples that we’re actually looking at all the time. But, certainly, we do need to be comforted by the fact that Christians have been faithful, and God has kept a people for himself for generations. Even just revisiting some of these, I just feel so comforted, remembering that God is so kind to keep for himself a people. And the same things that we are battling, he has kept people through in the past.
Matt Tully
I think sometimes we can tend to think that the situations that we’re facing today in the modern world are distinct and they’re unique from what maybe previous generations or eras of Christians have faced. And I think there is something comforting and encouraging and even motivating—a bit of a kick in the pants—to know that actually, fundamentally, we’re not facing new things. Christians have always been called to faithfulness in the midst of many of the same temptations and challenges that past generations have felt. Let’s go to this last era of church history, the modern period. Jonathan, I wonder if you could share a last prayer for us from that period that really stood out to you.
Jonathan Arnold
There’s one by William Jay, who’s another one of these figures that is probably often overlooked in our own era, but in his day was extraordinarily well known, largely for his preaching ability, his ability to command a pulpit and to provide exegetical exposition in a way that was accessible to his congregation, which included a whole host of very well-to-do people as well as the lower class that were able to engage together. But his prayer that we have in number 95, labeled a Prayer for Right Perspective, is one that, again, is one of these timeless ones that fits well in our world.
Matt Tully
Let’s listen to that one together.
Prayer for Right Perspective
William Jay (1769–1853)
Oh Lord, help us remember that gratitude is more fitting
to us than complaint. Our afflictions, indeed, have
been light compared to our guilt. They have been few
compared to the sufferings of others. They have all been
attended with innumerable alleviations. They have all been
necessary, all given to us with a regard for our welfare,
all designed to work together for our good. We bless you
for what is past, and we trust you for what is to come.
Indeed, we cast all our cares upon you, knowing that you
care for us.
Matt Tully
Jonathan, tell us a little bit more about William Jay. For those of us who aren’t as familiar with him, where did he live, and what was his occupation?
Jonathan Arnold
Jay was a pastor. He was an independent pastor, so he was not part of the Church of England, but was, at a time when the evangelical movement was really just getting started, he’s one of these influential figures that’s at the beginning of the broadening of that evangelical movement. And he worked with some of the major figures of the day, or maybe a better way to say it is they worked with him, because he was one that was more well known and had a large platform for his day. So he worked with people like William Wilberforce, John Ryland, some of these names that your audience may very well be familiar with. But in their day, they saw the network that he had, the ability that he had to bring the gospel to places that it had never been before, and even to make church and church going as part of a spiritual formation movement, even outside of the requirement of going to the state church. Seeing that as part of everybody’s desire to grow and to engage their own Christian tradition is a significant one. So he’s working in Bath, England, and that’s where he spends almost all of his time. He’s the minister at Argyle Chapel, which was a very significant chapel there as the evangelical movement, at least the modern version of the evangelical movement, really got going. He was very focused in his time. He dies in 1853, so he overlaps Charles Spurgeon by a little bit, but basically his predecessor, as far as a major preacher in England. But one of his focuses was on the catechetical understanding or training of the family. And so he produces prayer books and he produces handbooks for his congregants to use in their homes, specifically for the father to use as the major discipler of children. So he produces a work called The Domestic Minister’s Assistant, and the domestic minister, then, is the father in this case that is supposed to be responsible for the whole household. He puts himself in a long tradition. This is not new to him. People like Richard Baxter in the Puritan era, Martin Luther had produced a very similar type of work, all focusing on the work of the father as the one who is responsible for the religious stewardship. But Jay carries that on and really produces some of the finest work in that genre over the entire of church history. So it’s still well worth getting, for people who are interested in making sure that their family is well discipled. And even for your own soul, it’s a great work. And he’s got several of those kinds of collections.
Matt Tully
And that’s another great example of the way that sometimes we can think of the modern world, where the idea of a family devotional or a family resource for parents to use with their children, it feels maybe very modern. But actually, throughout church history, some of these resources that today feel perhaps a little bit inaccessible or intimidating, they were designed for very similar practical reasons—trying to help God’s people to teach the Bible, to teach the truths of the faith, to teach people how to pray. It’s all meant to be very practical.
Jonathan Arnold
And to recognize that the stewardship of those that are closest to you and the ones that God has placed under you really falls on you as the father, as the parents, and as those that are in the household. That it’s not to be given out to other sources alone. It’s always great to have the church come alongside and help disciple your children. I’ve got a great church here that has a great youth program, and I’m very grateful for it. But ultimately, my children need to hear and be discipled by me and my wife rather than primarily by the youth minister and the leaders there. But the church has always had that thought in mind. And like you said, it goes all the way back, and we could find examples earlier than Martin Luther and all the way through of people who focused on that idea of stewardship and of passing on the faith to the next generation starts primarily in the nuclear family. It goes elsewhere from there, but starts there.
Matt Tully
Maybe a final question for each of you. Zach, maybe you can start us off. Is there any prayer that you came across, that you recorded, or you wrote down and you just couldn’t fit it in the book for some reason? It didn’t make the cut, but you felt really bad that you had to actually cut this one out because you love it so much.
Zach Carter
Oh, there were honestly so many. And I think that probably the best example of some just because of copyright law and either inaccessibility in translation, there are dozens of works that I would have loved to have seen put in. Even one of the works that is featured but there are other prayers in it that couldn’t make the cut, Isaac Watts has an entire directory. He produced a manual very much like William Jay did. And Isaac Watts’ book contains a ton of those. There’s a figure, Lewis Bailey, who wrote a book called The Practice of Piety, and it’s a manual which predates these. It’s more in the era of Skougal, and none of his prayers are in there, but he has prayers for before you open up Scripture to do your private devotionals, here’s a prayer to pray. And so there are dozens of these prayers that live on in a Clippings document on my desktop.
Matt Tully
Jonathan, how about you? Is there any single prayer that stands out to you that you wish could have been in here, but it just didn’t quite make the cut?
Jonathan Arnold
Yeah, there were, like Zach said, there were several that I think kind of stand out. We’ve got a couple from the pen of Elizabeth I, who was very involved, especially early in her life, in theological writings and was obviously involved in the theological debates of the day as as the Church of England was coming about and was coming to its final formation. And so she leaves behind a couple of just beautiful prayers that demonstrate her own faith in the middle of those crises, or even early on before she’s even crowned Queen, that have been left to us. We would love to be able to include all of those kinds of things, but those stand out to me. I kind of come back around to those. I live in that era in my own historical studies, and so it often shows up just as a reminder of where those various crowns were and how that played out in their own personal life as well.
Matt Tully
That’s great. Jonathan and Zach, thank you so much for taking the time today to help us understand a little bit more what you’re doing in this really wonderful little book—to just remind us all, perhaps, of the riches of church history, the riches of our own heritage as Christians, and what we can draw from that heritage.
Jonathan Arnold
Thanks for having us. This has been wonderful.
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Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
1. Israel’s exile is the major theological catastrophe of the Old Testament.
Israel’s exile to Assyria and Babylon occurred over a series of events from 722 BC to 582 BC. You can read about them in 2 Kings 17 and 2 Kings 24. And although forced deportation is awful enough in its own right, these waves of exile were coupled with two other deeply significant events: the toppling of David’s dynasty and the destruction of Solomon’s temple. In 2 Samuel 7 we read of how God had given his people “rest” in the land, and in turn promised to David that he would have a kingdom forever and a son to build God’s temple. Subsequently, Solomon is that first royal heir, and he builds God’s temple in Jerusalem (1 Kings 1‒10). Thus marks the pinnacle of God’s saving purposes to date: God’s people in God’s place under God’s king and worshipping in God’s sanctuary. All of that is an affirmation that the Lord God is truly for his people, and with his people, and saving his people. What then is the exile but a stripping away of all of that? Because of the sins of their kings (1 Kings 14:15; 2 Kings 21:9), the people are driven out of the land, deprived of a king, and made to watch their temple crumble—all of which begs the terrible question as to whether God has abandoned his people and/or been defeated by the Assyrian and Babylonian gods. The OT “exile,” therefore, is a collection of disasters that create an unthinkable theological quandary. It must be resolved!
2. The Bible’s theology of exile long predates Israel’s historic exile.
Yet, the OT’s theology of exile does not start in 2 Kings. Rather, Israel’s exile is a microcosm of a much larger exile. In Genesis 3:24, Adam and Eve are ejected “east of the garden of Eden” because of their sin (Gen. 2:17; 3:6). Israel’s experience of exile, therefore, is representative of all humanity’s exile from our original home in God’s glorious presence. This is why Israel’s exile matters to everyone, even if we are not Israelites. For it is only through Israel’s return from exile that we too can return to the true presence of God. We also learn from Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden that there is a critical theological link between exile and death. They are told that they will die the day they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17). But on the day they eat of that tree, they do not die—strictly speaking. But they are expelled from the garden, and later they do die (Gen. 3:23–24; 5:5). We can conclude, therefore, that exile is a form of death, and death is a condition of being in exile. And such is the state of the world under “the curse” of sin (Gen. 3:17).
3. Return from exile motifs are all over the Old Testament.
The theology of exile and return is subsequently baked into the entire OT. The calling of Abraham demonstrates this in Genesis 11‒12. As he moves westward from Ur to “the land,” he is symbolically coming back to the presence of God. In turn, the language of Eden is used throughout Exodus by Joshua to describe the land promised to Israel (see esp. Ex. 3:8; Lev. 26:11‒12). Thus, Joshua’s entrance into the land is symbolic of a return to the garden of Eden (see esp. Josh. 1:13; 21:43‒45). Equally, insofar as the tabernacle is meant to look like and commemorate the garden of Eden (Ex. 24‒25), the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 comprise a liturgical return from exile—the high priest bearing Israel, and by extension all humanity, back into the presence of God. The point of all this is that Israel’s calling, escape from Egypt, entrance into the land, and worship practices all remember Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden and create the hope for all humanity’s return to the presence of God someday.
4. Return from exile is often associated with resurrection.
Throughout the OT these symbolic returns from exile are often accompanied with resurrection symbolism. Two examples will have to suffice. When Israel escapes from Egypt, it is said that they “go up” or “go out” (Ex. 3:8, 12, 17; 6:6, 11, etc.), which is the same language used of “going up/out” of the grave in other OT texts (cf. Gen. 46:4; Ps. 18:15‒16; Jonah 2:2, 6). Thus, Israel is metaphorically resurrected in their exodus! Also, when the prophets speak of Israel coming out of their Babylonian exile, they describe it as a resurrection of the nation (see Isa. 25 and Ezek. 37). In both of these cases, an atoning sacrifice is necessary to precipitate the return and resurrection (Ex. 12; Isa. 53).
5. Jeremiah says the exile will last 70 years, but Daniel says it will last 70 x 7 years.
The most famous prediction of the duration of Israel’s exile comes in Jeremiah 29:10, “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.” I say this is famous not because we know it very well, but because other biblical authors often refer to it. See 2 Chronicles 36:21, Ezra 1:1, and Daniel 9:2. But it is striking that upon seeing that those 70 years are ended, Daniel prays that the Lord will return his people to the land (Dan. 9:3‒19). But then the angel Gabriel appears to Daniel and says, “Seventy weeks [or “Seventy sevens”] are decreed about your people and your holy city . . . . ” That means that while the exile will end in one sense (Ezra does lead many home), it is ordained by the Lord actually to extend the conditions of the exile to seventy times seven years! I don’t think that number is meant to pinpoint a precise date, but to speak of a lengthening of the exile (and all it meant under #1 above) to a further horizon while all still under God’s sovereign timing.
6. With Jesus’s birth, teachings, and miracles the return from exile has begun.
The NT, therefore, opens with this ongoing exile emphasis (cf. Matt. 1:11‒12; 2:15, 18). But Jesus’s ministry is the dawning of the end-of-exile light (compare Matt. 4:12–17 with Isa. 9:1–2)! He heals diseases and raises the dead (compare Matt. 11:2‒6 with Isa. 35:1‒7). He offers “rest” from a heavy “yoke” (compare Matt. 11:28‒30 with Isa. 9:4 and Jer. 6:16). And he feeds his people on the mountains of Israel (compare Matt. 14:13‒21 with Ezek. 34:11‒14). All of these teachings and actions are clear prophetic signs that the exile is about to truly end through Christ.
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7. Jesus’s death and resurrection together are the climactic return-from-exile events.
I commented above that “exile is a form of death” and that “death is a condition of exile.” Conversely, throughout the OT the return from exile is described as a kind of resurrection. With that sort of background in place, Jesus’s death and resurrection can easily be seen as his own personal exile and return. Only his return to the presence of God is not like a resurrection, but a true historical bodily resurrection. Thus, all those images of return and resurrection in the OT were always pointing to Christ’s climactic work. Two NT texts help us understand this. In the context of describing the meaning of Christ’s death, Galatians 3:13 says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” As we saw above, the OT “curse” is that of exile. Then in Hebrews, we learn how Jesus has now gone into the true sanctuary of God (Heb. 8:1‒5). Thus, in Jesus’s death he has become the Christian’s substitutionary victim of exile as he pays the consequence of death on behalf of his people for their sins. And in the resurrection and ascension, he representatively entered into the true sanctuary of God on behalf of his people. Because sin leads to exile and death, Jesus has endured the exile and death due his people on their behalf. And because return from exile means resurrection into the presence of God, Jesus has been raised to minister in the heavenly sanctuary on behalf of his people.
8. Jesus’s ascension, the gift of the Spirit, and the creation of the church are return-from-exile effects today.
But the story of return from exile does not end there. The world continues to feel the effects of Jesus’s return-from-exile mission as his people are born again, evangelize others, and persevere in their faith. Paul tells us that we experience Jesus’s resurrection power when we put our faith in Jesus. Romans 6:4 says, “[J]ust as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (see also Gal. 2: 20). And Peter too says that God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). Thus, Jesus’s personal return-from-exile resurrection power is extended to his people. We can say, therefore, that Christians participate on Jesus’s return-from-exile experience through our union with him (see also Eph. 1:20; 2:5‒6; Col. 3:1‒3). Related, whenever we evangelize unbelievers, we are extending Jesus’s come-out-of-exile summons to the world (compare my comments in #6 above on Matt. 4:12‒17 with Matt. 28:18‒20). In this way, the rest of the world also experiences Jesus’s end-of-exile ministry. And finally, Romans 8 and Hebrews 3‒4 use a lot of the language of the exodus to describe how Christians persevere in their walk. Insofar as Israel’s exodus and eventual entrance into the land are also return-from-exile motifs (see #3 above), then so too are the struggles of the Christian life. Our head—the Lord Jesus Christ—has gone before us into the glorious presence of God, and in that sense, we can say we too have returned from exile. But it is also true that experientially, in this life, we are returning from exile. And to God’s great praise and our comfort, he is with us in our return-from-exile trek through this life.
9. The Bible’s theology of exile and return is only finally resolved in the last chapters of Revelation.
Our full and final return from exile will only be complete when Jesus returns and resurrects our bodies (1 Thess. 4:13‒16). Then we will enter into the new heavens and the new earth, a cosmic Edenic homecoming (Rev. 21‒22)! This beautiful passage in Revelation 21:1‒4 says it all:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Into this new reality, “the kings of the earth will bring their glory” (Rev. 21:24). And so the Bible’s long exile-and-return drama ends as Christ’s people enter into a geographic location where we will dwell with God forever. All because Christ has “died, and behold [is] alive forevermore” (Rev. 1:18)!
10. A biblical theology of exile is deeply relevant for forming the Christian life.
This biblical theology of exile and return is vital for Christians to understand. For one, it helps us read our Bibles better, and that is always good. Notice all the bits of the biblical narrative that I referenced throughout #1‒9 above: Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, exodus, Sinai, tabernacle, land, David, temple, Solomon, the prophets, Jesus’s birth and teaching and miracles, Jesus’s death and resurrection, regeneration, evangelism, perseverance, and our future hope. The Bible’s drama of exile and return helps us organize and make sense of all that together. Secondly, this biblical understanding of exile and return gives us a theology of history. And that is very important too. It tells us where we are in God’s world and when we are in God’s plans. We are one step out of exile and one step back into Eden! Christ is our “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf” (Heb. 6:19–20; cf. also Heb. 10:20)—and very soon, we are destined to follow him there! In a world profoundly confused about who they are, what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, and what is the meaning of life, this theology of homecoming is beautifully refreshing, inspiring, motivating, hope-giving, grounding, and identifying. Friend, if you’re still reading this, rejoice with me in the return-from-exile salvation Christ has brought, and open up your mouth to call others out of exile with you!
Nicholas G. Piotrowski (PhD, Wheaton College) is the president of Indianapolis Theological Seminary where he also teaches hermeneutics and New Testament courses. His other books include In All the Scriptures and Matthew’s New David at the End of Exile.
